ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. (WANE) --- The new Allen County Jail under construction, drainage and road projects, bridgework and consolidating county properties. That may sound like a rerun of what Allen County Commissioners focused on in 2024. But Therese Brown, elected board president Friday at the first commissioners' weekly legislative meeting of the year, said there’s another concern high on the list. That’s mental health. “We need to be raising the bar on what kind of services we can start trying to get more effectively in our Community Corrections as well as in the jail,” she said. Both Community Corrections and the jail deal with a lot of people suffering from childhood trauma, situational crises, drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness. Allen County Community Corrections diverts would-be inmates from incarceration to a work-release program at its Residential Services Center off Cook Road or home detention. “For years and decades, a person commits a crime, has an altercation, has a situation, (then) they enter the system, whether it’s just the local system or they end up having to go to the state Department of Corrections. When they come through the process, we need to figure out how we can have a system in place for the handoff of these individuals,” Brown says. Locally, Residential Services and Community Corrections’ Day Reporting Center have parts of what offenders need: “teaching people some of those basic skills that most of us have,” Brown says, “how to handle money, how to know when to exit a bad situation, how to stand up for themselves in a way that’s appropriate, but also being the unique person that they are.” These offenders need those services and what Brown calls “a handoff.” People getting released from the Indiana Department of Corrections or the jail need some kind of bridge to help ease re-entry into society without going back to their old ways. Now there’s money from the Opioid Settlement Funds that locally could amount to $6.6 million, according to a WANE-15 report published last year. The Commissioners, as part of a coalition, kicked in $50,000, but that amount wouldn’t be enough to sustain ongoing programs, Brown said. In the long run, Brown said it will come down to the relationships with Park Center and personnel/contracted personnel that offenders build so that they can get their medications and the services they need. “The handoff needs to be worked on so that we can have people in that transitional stage with the support that they need and the understanding of why it’s important for their own well-being to be able to be a productive, happy citizen, being in a better place.” Brown has built her expertise sitting on the Allen County Community Corrections Advisory Board and on its state arm, Justice Reinvestment  Advisory Council or JRAC,  and the Park Center Board as well as state boards for commissioners and counties. Both advisory boards meet at the same time and share membership. She sees the commissioners as mental health advocates and “constantly raising the banner to say we need to address these things and we need to deal with these situations as effectively as we can and use money that’s going to be able to help these individuals,” she said. Outgoing commissioner Nelson Peters worked with the state on the idea of using the new jail facility on Meyer Road as a potential regional mental health facility. The commissioners have been insistent that mental health and a medical facility be part of the new jail ever since serious discussion started in the summer of 2022, after a federal judge ordered Allen County to fix the problems at the existing downtown jail. Peters was replaced by Ron Turpin, who attended his first commissioner meeting Friday. As a commissioner, Turpin will sit on the Allen County Plan Commission and Department of Planning Services Governing Board as well as the Allen County Emergency Management Advisory Board. All three commissioners sit on the Allen County Drainage Board, while Brown and Commissioner Richard Beck have other assignments included in a list below. Appointments-Commissioners-2025Download The three commissioners voted on citizen board appointments, also listed here. Appointments-Citizens-2025Download